William G. Thomas III, The Chesapeake Bay

The Chesapeake Bay and the big rivers that feed into it have recently been seen as part of a much larger watershed encompassing six states and hundreds of counties. The Bay's ecology has suffered in the twentieth century, prompting the states that surround it to develop a regional compact to protect it. The Bay's history as a resource and a network for trade extend to Powhatan Society, however, and the Bay's history is marked by regional settlement patterns over hundreds of years.

The Chesapeake Bay's environmental history is complex and well-documented. Over 400 years of textual records document the Bay's environmental history, and over 10,000 years of archaeological, geological, and biological evidence complements the record. Recent environmental histories of the region stress the interrelationship between human settlement and activity and environmental systems and processes.

Some of the most exciting scholarship on the Chesapeake Bay emerged out of a recent series of National Science Foundation-sponsored conferences between historians, geologists, paleobiologists, archaeologists, and environmental scientists. Their interdisciplinary approach to understanding the Chesapeake ecosystem and its history indicates a central commonality across centuries of human presence in the region: the close proximity of natural and human systems and the close interaction between environmental shifts and human societal, economic, and even political change.

The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States and its watershed encompasses parts of six states (New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia). The Bay was formed only 10,000 years ago. Its Algonquian name, which means "Great Shellfish Bay," is similarly recent, perhaps only several thousand years old. But, 10,000 years ago the sea level was 325 lower than today and the Atlantic coastline stood 60 miles offshore at the Continental Shelf. The forests were covered in spruce and fir and the Susquehanna River carved its way to the coastline on the Continental Shelf over hundreds of years forming a deep and narrow channel with many tributaries. When climactic change brought warmer temperatures to the region and sea levels rose, the rivers gradually filled in to form the Bay and raise the sea level.